About
Past
I was born in Vietnam in 1983 and a year later my father went to work in Bulgaria, a small country in Eastern Europe. I had been traveling back and forth between Vietnam and Bulgaria for 11 years when my family moved permanently to Sofia, the capital city of Bulgaria. During that time I had a chance to visit a few countries including Germany, Hungary and Russia. I came to the US in 2002 and graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill majoring in visual communication in 2006. After school, I got offered a job as a graphics editor at The New York Times, where I stayed until 2008 and left to work for msnbc.com.
Present
I now live in Seattle and work as an interactive editor at msnbc.com. I produce interactive graphics and multimedia features for the site. I am also a freelance graphics designer. While not working, I try to explore the areas around my new home in Seattle. This blog is a venue for me to showcase my works and express my thoughts on design and the web.
2010 - Best in business from Society of American Business Editors and Writers for Adveristy Index Map.
2009 – Climbing Kilimanjaro was chosen to be part of the Design USA exhibition at the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.
2007 - Gold from malofiej 16 for Climbing Kilimanjaro
2007 - Gold from Society of News Design for Climbing Kilimanjaro
2007 - Best of Category: Interactive/Digital award in the 2007 CaGIS/ACSM Map Design Competition for Climbing Kilimanjaro
2007 - Awards of Excellence from Society of News Design for Endorsements of all shapes and sizes
2007 - Awards of Excellence from Society of News Design for Election '08 Campaign Finance
2006 - Mildred Gifford Scholarship
2006 - Documentary Multimedia Scholarship
2005 - Quincy Sharpe Mills Scholarship
Software: Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, After Effects, Dreamweaver and Flash; Corel Painter; Autodesk Maya; Digidesign ProTools; Final Cut Pro
Programming and markup languages: OOP AS2 and AS3, C#, Python, SQL, standards-compliant HTML, CSS and Javascript
Frameworks: ASP.NET MVC, Django, JQuery, ModestMap, Flare
Languages: fluent in English, Vietnamese and Bulgarian
- Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications by Toby Segaran
- Envisioning Information by Edward R. Tufte
- Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence
and Narrative by Edward R. Tufte - The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World by Alan Greenspan
- The Visual Display of Quantitative Informationn
by Edward R. Tufte - Beautiful Evidence by Edward R. Tufte
- Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug
- Prioritizing Web Usability by Jakob Nielsen and Hoa Loranger
- The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman
- The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst
- Editing by Design: For Designers, Art Directors, and Editors--the Classic Guide to Winning Readers by Jan White
- 1984 by George Orwell
